Cardinal Black

by Robert McCammon

  In the space of time since Devane and Matthew had departed, the Owl had sent the remaining four of his men who could walk—minus Perry with a bullet wound in his upper chest—out into the park, where Bogen’s body had been found and one of the coach’s drivers had emerged from his hiding-place to relate the story. Bogen was brought in and deposited in the foyer, and Samson Lash had sent a man down into the pit to find that the door to the passages had been unlocked. How Corbett had discovered the entrance beneath the gazebo’s steps and who had left the door unlocked—or who had unlocked it on purpose—were questions that Lash was not yet prepared to consider.

  After a few minutes in which Lash continued to turn the cup between his hands and contemplate the bitter twistings of fate, Cardinal Black returned with the Owl.

  “Close the door,” Lash told the cardinal, still speaking in a wan and quiet voice. Then, to the Owl: “Your men are gone?”

  “Just now. I instructed that Perry be taken to the Highcliff hospital.”

  Lash nodded, staring at the cup. The Owl had previously arranged for two coaches to arrive at six o’clock to transport his team of six security guards back to their homes. By their agreement, payment for the Owl’s services was now due and then he was to be ferried to his own townhouse in Southwark by one of Lash’s coaches.

  “Sit down,” said Lash.

  The Owl pulled a chair up before the vice admiral’s desk while Black stood in a shadowed corner probing at his blood-crusted nostrils and occasionally making a noise that was between a growl and a spit.

  The Owl said, “Sir, I regret—”

  “Don’t speak,” Lash interrupted. He kept turning the cup of ashes around and around, and then at last he released a long quiet sigh and put it aside. “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

  “May I say something?” the Owl ventured, and when Lash did not reply he dared to go further. “They can’t be travelling very fast in this weather. I’m sure you know the route they must be taking, and—”

  “The northwest pike,” said Lash. “Yes, I know.”

  “—and also I doubt that either Devane or Corbett have much experience in handling a coach of that size or a four-horse team. They will be hobbled by their circumstances. You, on the other hand, do not have to concern yourself with guarding two hostages and I presume you have another driver at hand.”

  Lash gave a brief nod, though he was staring through the Owl.

  “They might get as far as the first coach inn,” the Owl went on, “though I doubt that as well. In any case, the horses must be stopped to rest, and sooner than later in this snowfall. My opinion is that—as you yourself have stated—you can catch them within the day.”

  “Thank you,” the vice admiral said, “for your opinion.”

  A silence stretched.

  The Owl shifted nervously in his chair. “Samson…we have worked together…been compatriots…for these last three years. I have served you to the best of my ability, and certainly I have proven my worth in supplying the…um…raw material for Miss Mulloy’s episodes. I will continue to serve you in any way I can…and as a matter of respect and trust, I shall adjust my payment for this past night to half of what we have agreed upon.” He blinked, as this news had not caused an iota of reaction from Lash. “Is that not a fair accounting?”

  Lash leaned back in his chair. “I want to know,” he said, “who left that door unlocked. When your men took the bodies in they were given the key, which was returned and is now in the first drawer of this desk. Whoever failed to lock the door allowed Corbett to get in here. Who was it?”

  “I would have to make an inquiry. And believe me, I shall!”

  “No inquiry is needed,” said Lash. “I hold you accountable, and that I consider fair.”

  “Yes, of course, but…those men are my regulars. My best. They’ve done this before, they surely haven’t forgotten their instructions!” The Owl’s head swivelled around, more quickly than usual, to take note of Cardinal Black standing in the corner, and then came back around to face the vice admiral once again. “Something I noticed…something strange…about Corbett and Miss Mulloy.” He hurried on before Lash could respond. “It happened so fast…just an impression I had…that when Devane told Corbett to shoot her after the count of three…he hesitated. And what passed across his face was an expression of…I don’t know…reluctance or repugnance, whatever it might have been. It was there. I see those things, Samson. I sense them. You know I do, and that’s part of what you pay me for.”

  “Corbett didn’t wish to kill a woman,” said Black. “He’s funny that way.”

  “More than that,” the Owl rushed on. “The whole thing about Miss Mulloy climbing down off him in the pit, and wanting you to send him back to Professor Fell. It seemed to me at the moment to be…well…an excuse not to kill him. I didn’t say anything, because I know you trust her as your advisor, and rightly so. But…even there when Corbett had his gun on her…something passed between them. I saw it in their faces. He was not going to shoot her, Samson…and she knew he was not going to. Right after that, she was the one who said no one should be hurt on account of those two!” His mouth twisted below the protuberant golden eyes. “Her! As many as she’s put to death!”

  Lash’s solemn face was immobile.

  “And…and,” the Owl said, “consider this! She excused herself from the breakfast table. It wasn’t ten minutes after she returned that we heard the first gunshot!”

  “He’s blathering, Lash,” said Cardinal Black. “About to start weeping, I think.”

  “No, listen to me! Is it possible…at all possible…that she went down and unlocked the door for him? That she told him how to get in through the gazebo? That she has some kind of connection with him that we don’t know?”

  It was a moment before Lash replied, during which he reached out for the cup again and stirred the ashes gently with his index finger. “One of your men made the error,” he said. “You shame yourself by trying to muddy my Elizabeth. She has never known about the gazebo. I built that some months after I brought her home, and there was never any need for her to know.”

  “And I know why!” said the Owl, whose face had begun to display a sheen of sweat. “You didn’t want her running off into the city and murdering someone the law might take notice of! Because you could barely control her yourself, when she goes mad!”

  “Control your tongue,” Lash said softly. He stood up, which made the Owl also start to stand up but Lash said, “Stay seated. I have a complaint against your service that you may wish to weigh against your future value.” He walked around behind the Owl and placed his huge hands on the man’s frail shoulders. The Owl’s head turned to an impossible angle to look up—fearfully—toward the hulking giant at his back.

  Lash leaned down and spoke quietly into the Owl’s right ear. “For all your vaunted service and sense, you allowed two imposters to enter my house on the most important night of my life. You allowed them to take my Elizabeth and the book. You caused my airship to be lost…forever lost…”

  “I did my duty I swear it how was I to know—”

  “Shhhhhh,” Lash whispered. “You are paid to know. And here you are, adjusting your payment downward to account for the negligent act of—”

  His hands clasped the sides of the Owl’s head.

  “—destroying everything,” said Lash, and suddenly his face flamed red, his eyes widened and in an instant were shot through with blood, his teeth clenched together with a ferocity that nearly shattered them from his mouth, and the muscles in his arms beneath the medalled jacket jumped and twisted into knots as his hands began to squeeze.

  The Owl cried out and tried to stand, but already the power of Lash’s hands was crushing his skull inward. Four seconds after the pressure had begun the Owl’s body began to writhe and jerk, the golden eyes rolled up to show the whites, his own teeth chattered like a sy
mphony of bones and his hands flailed as if trying to find a grip in the air.

  Lash gave a bestial shout that made the wall shake behind Cardinal Black and trembled the glass window that looked upon the courtyard. His face was bloated with blood. As he continued to crush the Owl’s skull, his next shout to the god of vengeance made scarlet burst in a spray from his nostrils. Cardinal Black, for all his callous bloodlettings to the dark entity he called ‘master’, pressed himself deeper into his far corner and tried to become as thin a presence as possible, for it was apparent that Samson Lash’s rage had been released and with it the raw power of madness.

  Blue veins stood out in Lash’s hands and pulsed at his throat. There was a sudden loud broomstick crack of breaking bone followed by the lesser cracklings of sinews and muscles giving way like the timbers of a house in a hurricane. The Owl’s face collapsed inward. The left eye exploded from its socket and hung down the concave cheek by its oyster-colored string. Still Lash’s hands clutched the sides of the Owl’s misshapen head, and still the head became more misshapen as Lash’s strength put paid to the bill.

  The Owl’s open mouth released a shuddered moan. The body writhed in its chair, a bizarre sight as the arms and legs were set in one direction and the broken skull in the other. Blood gouted from the mouth, the nostrils and the ears at the same time. Lash hauled the Owl up, swung his body around and sent it smashing into the wall five feet away from Cardinal Black. As the Owl’s limp form sagged to the floor, Lash again picked the body up and hurled it into the wall, which cracked at the same time as did most of the Owl’s remaining intact bones. For a third time Lash heaved the body up and crashed it against the wall, his face a swollen rictus of rage. Then Lash began to stomp his heavy boots upon the crushed head, and at that time the study’s door flew open and Lioness Sauvage stood in the opening with Meacham, the uniformed doorman, behind her. Both of them recoiled from the sight before them. Lash shouted, “Get out!” as he continued to stomp down upon the ruined mass at his feet.

  They retreated. Lash gave the body a few final kicks and then, his face shining with sweat and the breath rasping in his lungs, he leaned over his desk and placed his hands upon the edges for support. With a grinding of his teeth he picked up the cup of brown ashes and threw them into what had been the Owl’s face, now become a scarlet crater with its lower jaw hanging off and its remaining eyesocket somewhere up where the forehead used to be.

  Lash stood breathing heavily and looking down upon his work.

  “If,” Black said quietly, still pressed into his corner, “I may speak?”

  “Speak.”

  “For all his negligence, he presented some valid points. Devane and Corbett must be followed and taken. They cannot be allowed this insult to your honor. You have a second coach and you have a driver. You have—we have—an auction to conclude.”

  “Go on,” said Lash, continuing to breathe hard.

  “In this house,” Black said, as he slid forward, “is one of the greatest assortment of killers you might ever hope to find. Tell them that the auction will conclude when the book is recovered, and when that is done you will announce the winner. I’m sure they would much rather join a manhunt than spend fruitless time twiddling their thumbs in their rooms. Yes?”

  Lash spent a silent moment pondering the suggestion. Then: “That will set them against each other, will it not?”

  “We will all be travelling in the same coach, with you as the arbiter of this contest. And with your dispatch of Victor you have demonstrated your willingness to command order from chaos. I, of course, will be there as well to…as the saying goes…watch your back.” Black approached nearer to the vice admiral, minding his footing on the mess below. “Use what is at hand,” he said. “Four killers of international renown—and you and myself—against Devane and Corbett. They don’t stand a chance, but we must hasten our path.”

  Lash stared down at the last of the ashen crisps being dissolved into the bloody swamp that had been a human face.

  He straightened up.

  “Go tell Meacham to wake Hodder, if he’s sleeping.” Hodder was the alternate driver, who kept a room in the coach house next to the stable. “Give word to Hodder to harness the second team and ready the coach. I’ll expect to be off within the hour. Then tell Meacham to gather up the empty wine bottles, fill them with gunpowder and…no, I don’t want Elizabeth or Firebaugh blown to bits. Fill them with lamp fuel, cork them and stand them upright in a box. Gather also some cotton wadding. And,” he added before Black could leave the room, “tell the others I will address them as soon as I clean myself of this mess the Owl has made.”

  “At once,” said Black, and he departed.

  Lash’s rage was not yet subdued. As soon as Black had left the study, the vice admiral overturned his desk and threw it aside like so much straw stuffing. He took the basket of satchels and flung them against the blood-smeared wall, for in his fury he had no interest in gold.

  Standing in the shambles of his study with the corpse at his feet, Lash put his hands to his head, squeezed his eyes shut and cried out a curse to the gods. Taking Elizabeth was one thing, but destroying the airship plans…that was a death sentence for Devane and Corbett, and the book of potions be damned. All Lash desired now, to stem these currents of rage that were sweeping him toward the deeper and darker waters of madness, was to get his hands upon those two, tear them to pieces and dance upon their broken bones. He had to go out and address the others. They would go, all right. Such a hunt would be a pleasure for them, and with the book in the balance…yes, they would go. But there was one small item that Lash thought neither Devane nor Corbett had considered, and because of it their coach might not get very far. In fact, their journey might end before they even got to the northwest pike.

  If Elizabeth had one of her spells and could get hold of a blade, she would kill them both. Unfortunately, in that unfettered condition she might also dispatch Firebaugh.

  Lash wanted to wash his hands of the Owl’s fluids and change his clothes before he spoke to the others, and with revenge and murder foremost in his fevered mind he left the study and strode along the corridor, leaving bloody bootprints in his wake.

  twenty-five.

  “By way of introduction,” said Matthew over the pistol he held on Lazarus Firebaugh, “my name is Matthew Corbett, the man driving this coach is Julian Devane, and we’re taking you to Professor Fell’s village in Wales, where you will search the book I’m sitting on to prepare a potion. After that, you can jump off a cliff as far as I’m concerned.”

  Firebaugh, ashiver in his nightgown for the cold was a steely presence within the coach, gave a slight, crooked smile. “Prepare a potion? Why?”

  “Never mind that now. Just settle back and enjoy the—” The coach felt for an instant as if the wheels had lost traction and the whole thing was sliding to the right, but before Matthew could register the fear of an impending wreck the wheels caught the road once more. “Ride,” Matthew finished.

  Elizabeth was staring burning holes through him. She had the polar bear coat draped over her as a blanket, only her head showing over its bulky folds. She said, “He was a fool to destroy the plans. You should’ve told him…take the book, take the doctor, take me along if you please…but don’t touch those plans.”

  “I didn’t know what he was going to do. I couldn’t have stopped him anyway.”

  “You’ll wish you had,” she answered.

  “You’ll wish you’d never been born after the vice admiral finishes with you,” said Firebaugh, crossing one thin bare leg over the other. “He’ll be on the road by now. You won’t make it to Uxbridge before he nabs you.”

  “We’ll see,” Matthew said. Julian was driving the horses as hard as he could, but in this weather it was an iffy proposition. The team could not gallop full out and they were constrained to a canter through the snow. Even so, it was a hard go for them an
d Matthew realized—as Julian must—that they were not going to last more than several hours. Certainly not a full day. Could Julian get the best out of them? It was difficult to say, because before climbing up to the driver’s seat he’d told Matthew he had limited experience driving a four-horse team and none with a coach of this size and weight. So indeed the future seemed, like the breaking dawn, dark and stormy.

  “This is a farce,” said Firebaugh. His eyes glinted with what Matthew considered to be the cunning of a trapped animal, though from time to time the animal shivered from the chill. “If you need me to concoct a potion, then surely you’re not going to use that pistol. I don’t think you’d shoot Miss Mulloy, either. You’re not the type. So what is there to stop either one of us from jumping out of this coach at the very minute? We might have a rough landing, but I think we’d survive.”

  “Damage would be done, snow or not,” Matthew replied. “You wouldn’t get far with a broken leg, and I can tell you that you’d receive rougher treatment from Julian than you would care to experience. So again I advise you to settle back and don’t consider anything stupid.”

  “What is stupid is this entire enterprise.” Firebaugh’s upper lip curled in a sneer of disgust. “Thinking you could get away with this?” He leaned forward slightly. “You have begun a game of squirrels and cats, you and your accomplice being the squirrels. You can run all you please, but the cats are on the prowl and when they get their claws into you it will seal your graves. But then again, the vice admiral might save you and your driver for his pit.” He shrugged and settled back against his seat once more. “Didn’t you witness the entertainment provided by the lovely RakeHell Lizzie?”